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| William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, about 1819–1820, at the Getty Center Museum. Tate, London |
Take the subtitle of the Getty's "William Blake: Visionary" literally. Blake was an artist who saw things that weren't there. Hilma af Klint took spiritual visions as a path to abstraction, while Blake devised a graphic-poet universe of six pack'd nudes. Moderately successful as a commercial engraver, Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy of Arts and befriended John Linnell and Henry Fusili, gaining a cult following among more mainstream British artists. Even such a conventional artist as Benjamin West was among Blake's admirers. It is as if Henry Darger took classes at the Art Institute, palled around with the Chicago Imagists, and illustrated popular children's books.
The strange side of Blake is exemplified by The Ghost of Flea, a picture of a monster the artist saw at a seance. The Ghost is a humanoid with some affinity to Korg of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, executed preciously and precariously in tempera on mahogany panel with gold heightening. At 8.4 by 6.2 in, it's smaller than an iPad. It may be the tiniest, murkiest, most street-banner-proof painting to be an essential part of 19th-century art history.
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William Blake, Self-Portrait, 1802-1804. Collection of Robert N. Essick
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| William Blake, frontispiece for Jerusalem the Emanation of the Giant Albion, 1804–c. 1820. Yale Center for British Art |
Among Blake's patrons was John Varley, a minor artist and astronomer with spiritualist inclinations. The two met regularly for late-night seances in which they tried to summon apparitions for Blake to record in sketches. Of an 1819 attempt Varley wrote,
"As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power, of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw: he instantly said, 'I see him now before me.' I therefore gave him paper and a pencil with which he drew the portrait... I felt convinced by his mode of proceeding, that he had a real image before him, for he left off, and began on another part of the paper, to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch, till he had closed it."
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| William Blake, The Head of the Ghost of a Flea, about 1819. Tate |
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| William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, about 1819–1820. Tate. Photo (c) Tate |
Oil on canvas was the usual medium for an ambitious painter. Blake protested that oil was muddy, favoring his own experimental tempera recipe that he called "fresco." Ghost was executed in tempera, and it has darkened with age. (Compare Ghost's brown soup to Constable's sparkling, nearly contemporary six-foot landscapes in oil.)
Why a flea? Blake's painting looks nothing like an insect. He's got braids, like a kouros, and his tongue flicks vampirishly towards a bowl of blood. There is a small though over-scaled flea between the Ghost's legs, barely visible. The Ghost's left hand holds an acorn, and his right carries a thorn. Both are attributes of the fairy folk, making this a forerunner of the Victorian fairy genre of Richard Dadd et al. Flea, however, is not in the woods. He strides a stage between two curtains, lighted by five-pointed stars. One star is a comet.
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| William Blake, Laocoön, image about 1815, text about 1826-27. Collection of Robert N. Essick |
Blake's attitudes towards classical tradition were… complicated. Flea's ripped musculature and mannered stance draw on classical antiquity, gothic friezes, and Michelangelo.
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| Engraving of a flea in Robert Hooke's Micrographia, 1665 (not in show) |
As an engraver, Blake was surely aware of the iconic printed image of a flea, after Robert Hooke's microscopic drawing. The microscope blew up a dimensionless point of irritation into a grotesquerie. Blake said the ghost-flea of his vision told him, "It was first intended to make me as big as a bullock; but then when it was considered from my construction, so armed—and so powerful withal, that in proportion to my bulk, (mischievous as I now am) that I should have been a too mighty destroyer; it was determined to make me—no bigger than I am."
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| Johann Heinrich Fuseli, An Old Man Murdered by Three Younger Men, early 1770s. Getty Museum |
Blake's overwrought figures were not quite so outré as it might seem. It's believed that Henry Fuseli's art was an influence.
The Getty exhibition is the first time
Ghost of a Flea has traveled to the U.S. in decades. The painting is famous in Britain. The teen protagonist of Martin Amis'
The Rachel Papers (1973) describes a museum date at the Tate: "On the way out I heart-rendingly bought Rachel a 3p postcard of Blake’s
Ghost of a Flea, offering it to her with boyish diffidence. She (quite rightly) kissed me on the cheek, just missing my spot."
"William Blake: Visionary" runs through through Jan. 14, 2024.
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| Wall at entrance to Getty Center's "William Blake: Visionary" |
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